‘So what do you think it is?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where does it come from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does it want?’
‘To kill me.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know.’
‘I know.’
‘What do you do for a living, Tuong Tommy?’
He ignored the purposeful misstatement of his name and said, ‘I write detective stories.’
She laughed. ‘So how come, in this investigation, you can’t even find your own butt?’
‘This is real life.’
‘No, it’s not,’ she said.
‘What?’
With apparent seriousness, she said, ‘There’s no such thing.’
‘No such thing as real life?’
‘Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by “reality” you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing.’
Having used two rolls of paper towels to clean the passenger’s seat and the leg space in front of it, heaping the last of them on the sodden little pile that he had created against the wall of the underpass, he said, Are you a New Age type or something – channel spirits, heal yourself with crystals?’
‘No. I merely said reality is perception.’
‘Sounds New Age,’ he said, returning to watch her finish her own task.
‘Well it’s not. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.’
‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘I’ll wander aimlessly in the wilderness of my ignorance.’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t become you.’
Are you about finished here? I’m freezing.’
Del stepped back from the open passenger-side door, the roll of plumbing tape in one hand and the razor blade in the other, surveying her work. ‘It’ll keep the rain out well enough, I guess, but it’s not exactly the latest thing in aesthetically pleasing motor-vehicle accessories.’
In the poor light, Tommy couldn’t clearly see the elaborate Art Deco, jukebox-inspired mural on the van, but he could discern that a substantial portion of it had been scraped off the passenger side. ‘I’m really sorry about the paint job. It was spectacular. Must have cost a bundle.’
‘Just a little paint and a lot of time. Don’t worry about it. I was thinking of redoing it anyway.’
She had surprised him again. ‘You painted it your-self?’
‘I’m an artist,’ she said.
‘I thought you were a waitress.’
‘Being a waitress is what I do. An artist is what I am.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you?’ she said, turning away from the door.
‘You said it yourself earlier – I’m a sensitive guy.’
On the freeway overhead, the airbrakes of a big truck screeched like the fierce cry of a scaly behemoth raging through a Jurassic swamp.
Tommy was reminded of the demon. He glanced nervously at one end of the short concrete tunnel, then at the other end, but he saw no monster, large or small, approaching through the rain.
At the back of the van, Del handed one of the two twelve-ounce bottles of orange juice to Tommy and opened the other for herself.
His teeth were chattering. Rather than a swig of cold orange juice, he needed a mug of steaming coffee.
‘We don’t have coffee,’ she said, startling him, as though she had read his mind.
‘Well, I don’t want juice,’ he said.
‘Yes, you do.’ From the two vitamin bottles, she counted out ten one-gram tablets of C and four gelatine capsules of B, took half for herself, and handed the rest to him. ‘After all that fear and stress, our bodies are totally flooded with dangerous free-radicals. Incomplete oxygen molecules, tens of thousands of them, ricocheting through our bodies, damaging every cell they encounter. You need antioxidants, Vitamins C and B as a minimum, to bind with the free radicals and disarm them.’
Though Tommy wasn’t much concerned about maintaining a healthy diet or vitamin therapy, he remembered having read about free-radical molecules and antioxidants, and there seemed to be medical validity to the theory, so he washed down the pills with the orange juice.
Besides, he was cold and weary, and he could save a lot of energy by cooperating with Del. She was indefatigable, after all, while he was merely fatigued.
‘You want the tofu now?’
‘Not now.’
‘Maybe later with some chopped pineapple, maraschino cherries, a few walnuts,’ she suggested.